The visual analytics community has long aimed to understand users better and assist them in their analytic endeavors. As a result, numerous conceptual models of visual analytics aim to formalize common workflows, techniques, and goals leveraged by analysts. While many of the existing approaches are rich in detail, they each are specific to a particular aspect of the visual analytic process. Furthermore, with an ever-expanding array of novel artificial intelligence techniques and advances in visual analytic settings, existing conceptual models may not provide enough expressivity to bridge the two fields. In this work, we propose an agent-based conceptual model for the visual analytic process by drawing parallels from the artificial intelligence literature. We present three examples from the visual analytics literature as case studies and examine them in detail using our framework. Our simple yet robust framework unifies the visual analytic pipeline to enable researchers and practitioners to reason about scenarios that are becoming increasingly prominent in the field, namely mixed-initiative, guided, and collaborative analysis. Furthermore, it will allow us to characterize analysts, visual analytic settings, and guidance from the lenses of human agents, environments, and artificial agents, respectively.
翻译:视觉分析社区一直致力于更好地理解用户,并协助他们进行分析。因此,大量的视觉分析概念模型旨在形式化分析人员使用的常见工作流程、技术和目标。虽然许多现有方法在细节上非常丰富,但它们各自专注于视觉分析过程的特定方面。此外,随着越来越多的新型人工智能技术和视觉分析场景的出现,现有的概念模型可能无法提供足够的表达能力来使两个领域之间产生联系。在本文中,我们提出了一种基于智能体的视觉分析过程的概念模型,借鉴了人工智能文献中的类比。我们以三个视觉分析文献中的例子作为案例研究,并使用我们的框架对其进行详细分析。我们的简单而强大的框架将视觉分析流程统一起来,使研究人员和专业人士能够推理在该领域日益突出的情景,特别是混合式、引导式和协同式分析。此外,它将使我们能够从人智能体、环境和人工智能智能体的角度对分析人员、视觉分析环境和指导进行表征。